A telecommunications network supports voice and data communications between customers. What is typically viewed as a single network, however, can actually be a series of separate networks, many times owned and operated by different companies. Oftentimes, a “single” data communications network will have portions that utilize different technologies. For example, one part of the network may be based upon frame relay technology while another part of the network is based upon asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) technology. A gateway is a network component that bridges these different portions.
One goal of a telecommunications service entity is to maintain the level of quality of the network. For example, entities presently provide for the presentation and dissemination of customer account and network data management information to their customers by, for example, enabling customers (clients) to connect to the entity's application servers to access their account information. The requests are processed by the entity's application servers, which retrieve the requested customer information from one or more databases, process and format the information for downloading back to the client.
As an example, larger telecommunications inter-exchange carrier enterprises provide management and performance information relating to circuits comprising a customer's broadband network, including web servers as an example. Such network management information generally includes details of network use and performance such as, for instance, real time status and alarm information, near real time performance data, usage statistics, SNMP data, etc. For example, the carrier could provide a system that monitors all aspects of web server health from CPU usage, to memory utilization, to available swap space so that Internet/Intranet networks can increase their hit rate and reduce Web server management costs. Software processes can generate alerts based on process health, connectivity, and availability of resources (e.g., disk usage, CPU utilization, database availability).
Such health reporting mechanisms have been implemented within a particular network. For example, a system has been implemented to generate health reports for a Frame Relay network. The system polled Frame Relay switches to obtain information on parameters such as CPU and memory utilization. This information was analyzed and provided to support staff on a regular basis so that it could be studied for conditions that might lead to a network failure or other instability. Similar health reporting has also been implemented in a Private IP (PIP) network.